Cairo Con­spir­a­cy

To the extent that it’s even pos­si­ble for a film about Islam­ic extrem­ism and cor­rup­tion with­in the Mus­lim faith to play it safe, Tarik Saleh errs on the side of cau­tion in Cairo Con­spir­a­cy. The stilled cin­e­matog­ra­phy favour­ing pen­sive, long takes brings a dig­ni­fied air to what could’ve been a sor­did pot­boil­er plot, rich in intrigue and decep­tion appro­pri­ate for a film revolv­ing around what hap­pens behind closed doors.

That’s exact­ly how a pri­vate board of elders elects a new Grand Imam, the high­est author­i­ty in the Sun­ni sect, at the world-lead­ing al-Azhar Uni­ver­si­ty in Cairo. On one end of an ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum, there’s Sheikh Durani (Ramzi Choukair), a hard­line con­ser­v­a­tive who may be men­tor­ing a small cell of stu­dent ter­ror­ists-to-be. On the oth­er, there’s an age­ing, blind Sheikh (Makram Khoury), the horse backed by shad­owy state appa­ra­tus­es hop­ing to get a foothold in the insu­lar reli­gious sphere.

The decent if sug­gestible Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) lands him­self in the mid­dle of this vac­u­um, recruit­ed to be the government’s man on the inside and sent to ingra­ti­ate him­self with Durani. Saleh’s film plays bet­ter as a cool-head­ed per­spec­tive on belief than the mov­ing-pic­ture equiv­a­lent of a taut page-turn­er that it would like to be. Yet West­ern media has trained us to brace for the worst in works engag­ing with the fanat­i­cal cor­ners of Islam, and so the ground-lev­el sobri­ety in Saleh’s treat­ment lands as a bless­ing all its own.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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